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Culture & History
Update to "Mean Bastards as Culture Heroes"
Jesse Lemisch August 5, 2010
A note on "Mean Bastards": This short piece, posted after the death of George Steinbrenner, has received a kind of confirmation in Ellen DeGeneres walking out on her five year contract worth tens of millions with "American Idol." I had criticized Simon Cowell (a former AI judge) along with Steinbrenner, Trump, etc.
Hacker and Dreifus’s Higher Education? A Neocon Screed
Jesse Lemisch July 27, 2010
I admire Claudia Dreifus’s interviews with scientists in the New York Times Tuesday Science section, and particularly her attention to women in science, and I know of her honorable history in the left and feminism. So I befriended her on Facebook. There she publicized her book, with Andrew Hacker, Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing our Kids – and What we Can Do About It, to be published by Times Books/Henry Holt on August 3.
Mean Bastards as Culture Heroes
Jesse Lemisch July 14, 2010
All day long, and on into a second day, here in New York, the media have been full of George Steinbrenner. He’s always been a Mean Bastard -- even in the Seinfeld version -- and that’s how he is memorialized: a Mean Bastard and a Winner. Sometimes he’s represented as a Mean-Bastard-with-a Heart-of-Gold-who-Gave-Money-to-Good-Causes. It would seem paradoxical to be deep in grief over a man universally acknowledged to be a Mean Bastard.
| Summer 2010 | Vol:XIII-1 | Whole #: 49 |
Foosball with the Devil: Haiti, Honduras, and Democracy in the Neoliberal Era
Adrienne Pine
From the perspective of Honduran and Honduranist scholars, the most common reference to Haiti is as a point of hemispheric comparison. Whether measuring GDP per capita, state legitimacy and citizens’ political tolerance, or corruption, the phrase “Honduras ranks last…after Haiti” seems to be de rigueur. This is no coincidence: the policies and structures that have effected extreme poverty and highly concentrated wealth in both places are very much connected.
Los Suns
Bill Littlefield May 12, 2010
It's not unprecedented for athletes here to object to racist policies, military invasions, and various other crimes and stupidities.
The raised, gloved fists of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium at the 1968 Olympics provide the most dramatic and public example of athletes taking a public stand against oppression. For their courage, Smith and Carlos were demonized and hustled out of town by the U.S. Olympic Committee, though today they are celebrated, at least in some circles.
"Drunk, crazy, and manipulated by their betters" - Sailors and Democracy
Jesse Lemisch April 15, 2010
My research on Jack Tar, the American colonial seaman, began in rebellion against the highly politicized historiography of the 50s and early 60s, which reflected Cold War values, stressing the classlessness of American society, the lack of conflict, and the irrationality of those who dissented. A conservative historiography saw crowd actions in early America as drunk/crqzy, or manipulated by their betters.
| Steve Shalom | April 12, 2010 |
Phil Ochs was, until his untimely death in 1976, one of the great American folksingers and songwriters, whose powerful lyrics -- political and poetic -- helped to inspire a generation. His sister Sonny Ochs has worked to keep Phil's memory and his message alive by organizing concerts bringing together current-day folk singers, offering a mix of their own material and Phil's.
| Marvin Mandell | April 4, 2010 |
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses
And all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again
How much can a citizen expect of his state?
Before we rush into the breach with solutions that only create more problems, solutions like more welfare, more job-retraining programs, more touchy-feely therapy, in short, more middle class boondoggling in a mind-boggling bureaucracy, let us try to find out what caused the problem.
| Steve Shalom | March 18, 2010 |
Conspiracy theorists often take evidence of government cover-ups as proof that a conspiracy occurred. Sometimes a conspiracy may indeed have occurred, but often the cover-up was designed to hide not some grand conspiracy, but malfeasance, incompetence, or wrong-doing.
| Summer 2005 | Vol:X-3 | Whole #: 39 |
Three Elegies for Susan Sontag
Ellen Willis
1. Art